A homeless person reportedly confessed that they were the cause of Saturday night’s fire in downtown Ephrata. Ephrata Assistant Fire Chief Anthony Graff says he and his staff were called out to the fire at around 9 p.m. Graff says Grant PUD-owned spools that used to contain power cables caught fire next to a Moore Furniture warehouse off 2nd Street near Bellissimo Salon.
- PUB DATE: 4/20/2020 7:49:26 AM - SOURCE: iFiberOne

Fire chiefs through the western United States are being asked to propose budget cuts between 10% and 25% for their departments—often including EMS service—as local governments try to fund operations in the face of dramatic tax-revenue declines caused by stay-at-home measures designed to slow the spread of COVID-19.
- PUB DATE: 4/20/2020 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: IWCE’s Urgent Communications

For three years the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Center has equipped 30,000 people with smart rings and smartphone apps to determine, before any signs of illness, whether they had influenza. So it required only some computer algorithm adjustments to launch a pilot project in March to monitor 200 front-line healthcare professionals for COVID-19 and determine the presence of infection and potential for contagion 24 hours before flu symptoms emerge.
- PUB DATE: 4/20/2020 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Paramedic Amy Dyer Drinkwater watched COVID-19 on the approach well before it gained a foothold in Maine. As the director of three ambulance services – St. George, Thomaston and South Thomaston – she had the safety of the community and staff to consider, and this particular risk was novel, not only in its pathology and virology, but in the way it skulked around, undetected.
- PUB DATE: 4/20/2020 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: Penobscot Bay Pilot

One by one, 85 ambulances and firetrucks trickled down the narrow street in a somber procession, snaking their way through the Port Monmouth section of Middletown. As the first responders rolled past the forest green house, they each blared their sirens to honor one of their own. Robert Weber, a Middletown First Aid and Rescue Squad volunteer and firefighter, was only 44 when he died April 15 from complications of the coronavirus.
- PUB DATE: 4/20/2020 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: NJ.com